A Peculiar Combat System

I’m supposed to concentrate on writing TSoY, but a short note about something else should break the pace nicely. The following came to me yesterday when I pondered the system aesthetics of fantasy adventure games: if I were to design a beginner-friendly fantasy adventure game, I would consider the d20-based D&D mechanics and pool-based Tunnels & Trolls mechanics both too dependent on special tools – strange dice shapes or too many dice, to wit. So I started thinking of how I’d create a traditional fantasy rules set using only a deck of playing cards.

My Roleplaying History #5

This last part of my rpg history concerns the last five years or so. This stuff is probably pretty well-known to my friends, I’ve left much more documentation behind in the Internet and other places lately than I used to earlier. Still, it won’t hurt to list some of the gaming that feels particularly significant to me.

My Roleplaying History #4

The last part of my history progressed to late ’90s, so here I’ll continue about how came to encounter the Forge – this was a major turning point in my roleplaying hobby. In between high school and college was my year in military service in… -99 to 2000, unless I’m mistaken. Continuing from there:

My Roleplaying History #3

The third part of my personal rpg history series. The second part dealt with my formative years in the mid-’90s, so here I’ll write about how I stopped roleplaying. I’ve told this story to many people when it’s come up, but perhaps there’ll be some interesting detail here for those interested in that sort of thing.

My Roleplaying History #2

The story of my roleplaying history continues. The last part was about my earliest rpg memories and how I came to initiate myself into the hobby of roleplaying in the first place. This second part has some real rpg action, I’ll write about my first rpg-playing years.

My Roleplaying History #1

A friend of mine, Sami Koponen, wrote about his roleplaying history a while back (in Finnish). He also asked a bunch of other Finnish roleplayers to write similarly about theirs. I’ve been relatively busy with work-type things, but I might as well do this rpg history thing at this juncture. This’ll be quite a long memory trip, so I’ll split it in parts.

Levels at Jyväskylä

I haven’t been blogging much lately, what with being busy doing real work. A little convention report should be doable, however: we were at Levels in Jyväskylä this past weekend with my brothers to represent and advocate for roleplaying game culture amongst the other game programming. Levels is a small video game convention (500 people or so) with a delightfully comprehensive view on the boundaries of game culture, encompassing and supporting quite a bit of non-electronic gaming as well. This was only the second year Levels has been convened, but perhaps it’ll continue; the convention is arranged by the local university of applied sciences as a student project, I understand, so it has some chances of becoming an institutional event in perpetuity even after the current crop of students leaves the house.

Challenging the Diplomacy rules?

I’m something of a fanatic when it comes to the rules of Diplomacy. I have a reverence for them that must be quite unhealthy – I consider the game one of the most perfect designer games, a wonderfully powerful and robust engine that does exactly what it purports to. Thus I’m very hesitant to give my blessings to even small deviations from the rules, unless they display the same sort of universal power we get with the Calhamer rules. (Ironic how I am still capable of participating in those detailed arguments about convoy paradoxes and such; those parts of the rules text are and have long been a mess, even if the rules as they are played around here are very clear and logical. As always, I try to play according to the Platonic ideal of the rules, not so much based on any particular edition of the text.)

I myself haven’t had any strong inclination towards changing the rules of Diplomacy with house rulings of any sort, and I usually just yawn at any variants that add things on top of the basic structure, making it more complex. So it’s quite surprising that for a while now I’ve been iddly wondering about one particular rules change that I can’t quite dismiss on the grounds of inferiority. Could I have figured out a rule that actually improves Diplomacy? I’ll need to test this one and find out!

Overview of the Diplomacy scoring conundrum

Diplomacy is one of the most played and researched of modern designer boardgames. Regardless, many interesting theoretical issues remain. One I’ve been occupying myself with is scoring games – or more generally, evaluating player performance. I have some vague notion that this’ll be useful when we have tournaments here in Finland, but mostly I just find this issue an interesting theoretical problem. It’s so challenging, in fact, that I don’t have any ready-made answers – I can formulate the question, but I don’t have a perfect response.

About the D&D Combat System

This is a sort of sister thread for my look at Vancian magic from last week. Looking at what you actually do in D&D (generally, not specifically the modern take), this is what I get:

• Plenty of freeform negotiation of situations (which I’ve sort of already dealt with last year in my discussion of challenge-based adventuring); despite some weak efforts to the contrary, the core D&D experience really runs on the basis of you-imagine, I-imagine, the result of which is a set of mutually accepted (credible, in theory-speak) challenge constraints that are then set in stone until the challenge is completed.
• The magic system, which is the most important resource subsystem in the game. Increasingly so at higher levels, increasingly so in later editions.
• The combat system, which is what you do with that positioning and those resources.

So it stands to reason that I’m interested in tackling the combat system now.